KREEZUS, Your 2014 Holiday Soundtrack. Thanks, Kanye Claus!

If you're anything like me, Christmas Eve dinner has been underscored by the exact same Mannheim Steamroller album for as long as you can remember (which, after about 15 full loops, is occasionally followed by Celine Dion's Christmas album, although hopefully by then you're too drunk to care). Maybe you tried in change tradition in favor of the phenomenal Sufjan Stevens Christmas album but it didn't stick because Santa Claus is apparently really partial to symphonic synth-pop and melodramatic adult contemporary soft pop with an abusive amount of flutes. 

But all of that is that about to change. Because a comedy group called Local Business Comedy just released this Christmas-themed remake of Kanye West's Yeezus, and it is everything you need to deck the halls with Yuletide cheer, mothaf*cka. 

Sure, you might be worried that mom & dad might not be so keen on those Ye's thick distorted grooves, but think of this way: they want to be hip and in the know, right? Use Kim Kardashian's buttshot as a segue from The Interview or police brutality or whatever else you don't want to talk about, and bam. Kreezus

Don't worry. You'll thank me later.

Re-Creating the Beastie Boys' "Paul's Boutique" From the Original Sample Sources (with bonus visual companion)

I found your next party mix — one hour of straight rockin', all in honor of the late MCA! A group of DJs identified each individual audio sample used to create the Beastie Boys album Paul's Boutique, then went back to the original sources and re-remixed the samples for a whole new take on the album. The three DJs — Cheeba, Moneyshot, and Food, collectively part of Solid Steel — each took a third of the album and re-mixed the sample sources as each one saw fit, creating a new song from the same pieces, which puts a really cool artistic spin (no pun intended) on the idea of sampling. (If you break it down, it's quite post-post-modern — the art of sampling itself is very postmodern in the way it deconstructs and re-examines a source material, and this takes to a whole other level).

You can check out the complete track-listing of samples used over on Soundcloud (along with the breakdown of who mixed what).

As long as we're on the topic of the Beastie Boys, Paolo Gilli created Paul's Boutique: A Visual Companion in honor of the 25th anniversary of the album's release. The film takes its inspiration from the lyrical and sonic landscape of the Beastie Boys' sophomore effort and transforms into an hour-long visual narrative feast of 70s cinema, funky beats, and dirty New York City streets. On his website, the filmmaker explains:

I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to the album in all these years, but at some point the idea began to form in my mind about how cool it would be to have a visual counterpart of the whole record. Only later I discovered that this had been MCA’s plan from the very beginning. The countless pop culture references and the density of the music offer so many possibilities on how to visually approach the record. Also, the urban legend regarding Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moonwhen paired with the movie The Wizard of Oz, basically a result of the concept of synchronicity, had a certain influence on me. [ . . . ]

As I saw tributes in memory of MCA pop up all over the world, I wanted to do something myself. Finally I sat down and began writing what you could call the editing script for Paul’s Boutique - A Visual Companion. The concept was to use all the original videos (Shake Your Rump, Hey Ladies,Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun and Shadrach) as a kind of skeleton to build around the rest of the movie. [ . . . ]

The Companion evolved after that original script, but in the end we stayed surprisingly close to the original concept. But something else happened, something strange. Some of the ideas I had from the start turned out to be almost as multi-layered as the tracks themselves. Luck, fate, coincidence, karma, call it whatever you want, but out of nothing the weirdest connections between music, lyrics and images came to be. There are some things that only film buffs, hardcore Beastie Boys or Hip Hop fans will get, but that’s not even half of the story. Let’s just say that free association has a big part in how well you will understand the movie. That said, even though we started out with mainly Beastie Boys fans in mind, our goal was to make this an enjoyable viewing experience for everybody else too.

Ch-ch-check it out below (see what I did there?): 

Song of the (Bi-)Week, Week 7: "I Gotta Feeling"

I'm going to be completely honest right now: I think "I Gotta a Feeling" by the Black Eyed Peas is one of the most trite, mundane, and obnoxious songs ever written. And the fact that anyway — including but not limited to my left ass-cheek — could have written something so asinine makes even angrier, because neither me nor left ass-cheek did write it, and neither one of us is famous. The song came on while I was driving the other day, and I started thinking of ways to make it better (and by better, I mean worse, which means better, because it's already the worst. Get it?). So I grabbed my acoustic guitar, dropped it into a minor key, and suddenly America's moronic party anthem sounds...well, it sounds like a struggle with addiction, really. Not to make light of that issue, I do find it interesting how fine the line is between fun and self-destruction, as this musical, but not lyrical*, shift demonstrates.

[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/13193367"]

*Okay, there's a slight lyrical shift. I know, it's slow, it's sad, but keep listening towards the end of the 2nd verse, and there might be a little surprise waiting for you....